June 21, 2017 issue
Authors' & Writers' Corner
of the foot’
Bernard Heydorn
According to the BBC, the bicycle is 200 years old this month of June. The first official bicycle was made almost entirely of wood. It was invented by a German, Baron Karl von Drais in 1817. Later came offshoots of the bicycle including tricycles, unicycles, three wheelers, the Penny Farthing, carrier bikes, racing bikes, all terrain bikes, mountain bikes, tandem bikes and others, the most recent being the Trikke.
In my time, growing up in Guyana after World War Two, the most popular bikes were made by Raleigh.
There were other makes like Rudge, Humber, and Hercules, but the British-made Raleigh commanded the market. My father owned, for many years, a resurrected French bike that we called ”the Gallows”. It was big and heavy and could carry four people. One person sat on the handle bars, legs astraddle the front wheel, another on the cross tow bar, a third was the rider sitting on the saddle, and a fourth sat on the passenger carrier seat over the rear wheel. My father called his bike his “feet” for he used it to go everywhere, including his job as a sanitary inspector.
He lent it to me every day to do shopping for the family at the market. I had many escapades with this contraption, described in my book Walk Good Guyana Boy. The Gallows final days were spent in Georgetown, where I used to ride it to go to school at St. Stanislaus College. The boys at Saints constantly ridiculed me and the bike calling it “a war tank”.
Historically, I come from a somewhat “celebrated” cycling family. In the Victorian era, my maternal grandfather, Jose Menezes, born in Madeira, won a prize for best decorated bicycle at the annual cyclists parade in Georgetown. He was a member of the Vasco da Gama cycling club. In 1904, he won a racing prize at the Governor’s Challenge Cup at the British Guiana Cricket Club Ground in Georgetown. Later, cycle racing took place at the Georgetown Cricket Club ground.
Two of his sons, uncles of mine, rode competitively in Guyana in the early part of the 20th century. Our eldest son turned his interest to motor cycling and competed in Canada and in Guyana. Cycle racing was very popular in Guyana in the 20th century. Laddie Lewis was a famous Guyanese cyclist who reportedly competed in the 1948 Summer Olympics.
I have been surrounded by bicycles just about all my life. Right now, there are six bicycles at home – I ride a Raleigh Legend and my wife rides a lady’s Raleigh Matterhorn. I never owned a new bike as a child or adolescent. They were always hand-me-downs. I remember riding a tricycle and learning how to ride a bike. After a number of spills and bruised knees, I got the hang of it. Riding a bike, they say, is a skill you never forget. My older sister learned to ride a bike as a child by sticking one leg through the frame of her brother’s bike and peddling furiously, which was quite a sight!
The Penny Farthing bike always got my attention as a child. It had a very large front wheel, a high frame, and a very small back wheel. To mount and ride this bike was an acrobatic feat. Just to get on it, balance and ride off was breathtaking. To stop and leap off safely was rarely achieved. This Victorian bike always drew an audience. I never saw a woman ride one in those days. Heaven knows what would happen if she fell, clothed in her skirt and petticoats!
The Golden Age of bicycles in my opinion was the Post Second World War era – the 40s and 50s. The touring bike was the standard. On the high end with three gears was “the ticker”. It provided transportation for many folks around the world. Men, women and children used it everywhere. In Third World countries, it was a status symbol. If you owned a bike, you had made it to the top. In those days, a new bike cost about $100.00 in Guyana. Considering a clerical worker was paid about $12.00 a week, it took two months' salary to pay for a bike! When “hire purchase” became available, many more people were able to own bikes.
What I like about the bikes of the Golden Age was their shiny and beautiful finish. The generator spinning on the front wheel provided lights to front and back. There were reflectors, the mudguard, the chain guard, the fenders, the spring Dunlop saddle, the rubber brakes, the coaster model, the models for men, women and children, the bicycle bell, the battery horns, the honking horns, the handle grips, attached bicycle pump, the rear carrier seat, the bicycle basket to carry shopping, groceries and school books, and the kickstand.
You name it, the bicycle had it. It is no wonder that some Georgetown characters went overboard and decorated their bicycles in the most colourful and entertaining way, including windmills and spinners. The clanging of bells and honking of horns was a common scene in Georgetown in those days.
In the era I describe, many cyclists would ride to the Seawall in Georgetown on Sunday evenings and show off their bicycles. Some “poodlers” would perform stunts like “stickling” (balancing in a stationary position), or doing wheelies. I could never be a “poodler” on my father’s bicycle, the Gallows. I would have hung myself.
Cycling has made a comeback in North America and in many other countries. With a rage for fitness and considerations for the environment, some folks are riding to work and play rather than driving. There are bicycle paths and laws to protect cyclists on the roads. There are safety features like helmets. BMX and modern bikes are fast and light. Spare parts and bicycle sporting events have generated much interest and subsidiary industries.
My wife and I invested in a Trikke, a scooter-like recent invention, which you propel simply by the movement of your body. It looks like you are doing the moves of the rumba dance. It generates a lot of attention and a lot of energy. President and Mrs. Carter have been seen riding Trikkes.
What does the future hold for bikes? If the past is anything to judge by, it should be quite exciting. I will continue riding for as long as I can. The bicycle is part of my past, present and future. If the creeks don’t rise and the sun still shines, I’ll be talking to you.
By Romeo Kaseram
Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayanaswami (R. K. Narayan) was born on October 10, 1906, in his grandmother’s house in Madras, India. His father was the prestigious headmaster of state-run schools in the old Mysore state. He was third of eight children, and was raised in as middle-class Tamil Brahmin family in an ancient quarter of the city that held on to the links of its rural past. The rest of his family lived in Mysore. Despite his father’s career in the education system, Narayan does not appear to have applied himself to his books; instead, an early picture emerges of an undistinguished student. As he said, he attended school as a reluctant pupil, preferring to day-dream, and found difficulty in making the figures add up in subjects as arithmetic. While living with his grandmother, he studied at different schools, among them the Lutheran Mission School in Purasawalkam, C.R.C. High School, and the Christian College High School. Among his reading during the early years were works by Charles Dickens, P.G. Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle and Thomas Hardy.
Narayan moved to Mysore in 1922 to live with his family when his father was transferred to the Maharajah's College High School. After completing high school, Narayan failed the university entrance examination twice; once, remarkably, in English. However, the time spent at home appears to have been profitably utilised in reading and writing. Following this, he finally passed the entrance examination in 1926 and entered Maharaja College of Mysore. It took him four years to obtain his Bachelor's degree, a year longer than normal, and unusual for a young man at that time. Narayan then began his search for a career – his choice to be a teacher lasted four days in 1930, leaving the role in protest after being asked by the headmaster to instead become the physical training master.
With his dream to become a writer, it was inevitable his next career decision saw him remaining at home, where with pen and paper in hand, he sat down with the objective to write novels. It was in September 1930, a day his grandmother had selected, perhaps as being auspicious, when he opened an exercise book, and waited for inspiration. He wrote his first line, “It was Monday morning”. Later, he would recount in that moment what came to him was a railway station, and as he said, the name “seemed to hurl into view”. It was Malgudi – and as he later claimed, this was the pivotal moment in his writing life.
Narayan had “an ability to make the rhythms and intricacies of Indian life accessible to people of other cultures”, Susan Ram and Narasimhan Ram tell us in The Guardian. They add: “Central to this was Malgudi, his fictional south Indian town, which he peopled with ordinary men and women made memorable by his art. Narayan's writing, deceptively simple and seemingly innocent of literary technique, is distinctive for its voice, its fusion of the comic with the sad, and its philosophical depth. He was famed for his lightness of touch and lean, lucid style.” They add, “He was in a category all his own; he had no forebears or peers to relate to. He was perhaps the first modern Indian writer to make literature a fulltime career. Between 1930 and his death, he wrote 15 novels and scores of short stories; nearly all his fiction was located in Malgudi.”
They add: “Far from the clamour and turbulence of metropolitan India, Malgudi is a place where change is leisurely and incremental. It connects with a rural hinterland, and jungle and forest are never far away. It teems with life, abounds with colour. To wander any street, peer through a window or push open a door is to encounter a character: Swami, the undistinguished, cricket-loving schoolboy; Savitri, the put-upon, and briefly rebellious, housewife; Krishna, the college lecturer traumatised by the loss of his wife; Margayya, the financial expert at his questionable business beneath the banyan tree; Raju, the tourist-seeking guide.” It is through “these characters and their moral predicaments” where Narayan “dissolves a barrier of strangeness, revealing the universal in the particular”. A good friend, Kittu Purna, showed some of this writing to the English novelist, Graham Greene in Oxford in the early 1930s. Both writers would later go on to become good friends, Narayan later sending all of his major fiction for Greene’s perusal and editing. As his eminence grew, Narayan had among his admirers Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, H.E. Bates, Elizabeth Bowen, Malcolm Muggeridge, Compton Mackenzie, and Paul Scott.
According to the Routledge Encyclopedia, Narayan's novels fall naturally into three different periods, with his first four novels almost entirely autobiographical: there is the trilogy Swami and Friends (1935), The Bachelor of Arts (1937), and The English Teacher (1945). It was Swami and Friends that first came to the attention of Greene, as did later The Bachelor of Arts, and The Dark Room (1938). His succeeding works, while not autobiographical, are richer, broader and complex. Mr. Sampath (1949), republished in the US as The Printer of Malgudi (1955), along with the next four novels, are among Narayan’s best for its creativity. As the Routledge Encyclopedia indicates, it is here where “Malgudi acquires its firm contours, its landmarks are fully realised, and its wide variety of characters come to seething life.” There is also greater creativity in The Financial Expert (1952), Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), and The Guide (1958), the latter ranking as probably his best-known work.
Also among his fiction are The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961), The Vendor of Sweets (1967), The Painter of Signs (1977), A Tiger for Malgudi (1983), Talkative Man (1986), The World of Nagaraj (1990), and Grandmother's Tale (1992). Other writing includes essays, travel writing, and the retelling of epics and myths. With his roots in the epics and myths of India, he put his knowledge of Hindu culture to retelling the Ramayana (1972) and the Mahabharata (1978), as well as other myths and legends. Among his non-fiction are Next Sunday (1960), My Dateless Diary (1960), My Days (1974), Reluctant Guru (1974), The Emerald Route (1980), A Writer's Nightmare (1988), A Story-Teller's World (1989), The Writerly Life (2002), and Mysore (1944).
He won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1960 for The Guide, and the Padma Bhushan in 1964. He was also nominated a member of the Rajya Sabha in the upper house of India’s Parliament. The British Royal Society of Literature awarded him the A. C. Benson Medal, while in the US he received the English Speaking Union Book Award, and was made a Fellow of the prestigious American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1982. Narayan is respected in the post-colonial world of writing. He was nominated more than once for the Nobel Prize, and died on May 13, 2001.
Sources for this exploration: Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, Second Edition, and The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/may/14/guardianobituaries.books, along with Wikipedia.